How do I convince my boss that all rag-right sucks?

September 26, 2007 12:39 PM

Help! I'm fighting a battle about graphic design, specifically rag-right vs. perfect justification. How can I sound more convincing?

I work for a magazine. I've just been told that the owner of the company wants everything to be rag-right from now on. EVERYthing - all the columns, all the articles, all the departments. He said don't perfect-justify anything. I would like to challange that, but the only argument I have is that, well, "rag right everything looks like crap!" Obviously I'd like to sound more intelligent. Can you help with some good solid reasons why it's better to use justified text as opposed to all rag right? I know it looks cleaner, but I'll need to do better than that when fighting this battle. Thanks for any help you can provide! (Question is asked anonymously because I don't want work folk to see this, or the magazine identity to be revealed)

posted by anonymous to media & arts (27 comments total)

Justified text has a bad rep because of the lousy kerning in programs like Word. So this initiative may be more of a rejection of bad justification rather than an embrace of ragged right for its own sake. But professional layout programs handle justification quite smoothly as long as your columns aren't ridiculously narrow, or if you're willing to re-edit the text to make it fit into justified space more smoothly if you do need narrow columns. Forced justification in narrow columns can look horrible, and this is possibly what the owner is reacting to.
posted by maudlin at 12:52 PM on September 26, 2007

Can you tell me how wide is each column of text (approximately how many words per line)?
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 12:52 PM on September 26, 2007

By rag-right, you mean left justified, right?

First, decide how far you want to take this? Is it worth losing your job over? Pissing off coworkers, your boss, or the owner? Whatever your answer is fine, but decide how far you want to take it first.

Depending on the magazine and how it's done it might be fine.
I'm looking through a local one right now and it's not a big deal. Letting the text have it's natural space as opposed to forcing it look and neat and pretty is perfectly acceptable.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:53 PM on September 26, 2007

In some situations, ragged right looks better. For example if you have a short measure, justified text is going look really crappy. Be prepared to compromise. If you insist that ragged right always looks bad, you'll look like a partisan fool. Although it seems that

The one place I find that ragged right text can look really bad is when you have multiple columns. It can lead to lots of trapped white space, a big design no-no.

If your magazine is going to go through with this plan, you should take note of Bringhurst's comments in The Elements of Typographic Style about turning hyphenation off along with justification.
posted by grouse at 12:54 PM on September 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

Rag-right is very sloppy in some cases, but not all. You might want to point out that long lines followed by short lines causes an awkward look, making it visually unappealing, and even distracting at times. You end up with a lot of white-space.

But this is all my opinion, and I'm pretty picky. Really you have to look at the product as a whole; you might think justified type looks better, but it may not look as good as you think depending on the font, or the letter-spacing. It all comes down to legibility. Honestly, you both might win by using a combination of both.
posted by sephira at 12:57 PM on September 26, 2007

The magazines for which I've worked (and designed) have used justified columns because:
1. They tend to save space
2. They reduce the time needed to clean up weird line breaks, badly-hyphenated words, and bad rags
3. They tend to produce fewer widows

You're going to need to present this argument in terms of dollars, because that's the language the owner is going to understand--he or she doesn't care about whether you think it looks nice. I would say something about how much it's going to cost in terms of time and money to update all your style sheets and templates, to massage and clean up bad rags, fix bad hyphenation, bad line breaks, widows, etc. Making this change isn't cheap, and it's going to increase the time and money the art department and the editors will need to make changes and fixes.
posted by fandango_matt at 1:06 PM on September 26, 2007

I think your real problem is how to get the owner of your company to let the designers make the design decisions.

That aside, I'm a former print and web designer who finds ragged-right much more readable than justified, especially online and especially for longer blocks of text. Unless it's done right, with a lot of attention to word spacing and hyphenation, full justified is hard on the eyes. More info here. I'd advocate using justified to visually set off other departments on the page and only if they are brief/short compared to the main content of the page.

Will your readership continue to read if it's slightly more difficult? For some audiences of some publications (I'm looking at the serifed and dainty-columned New Yorker right here), the answer is yes.
posted by cocoagirl at 1:07 PM on September 26, 2007

I've only been a fan of justified text if I get to edit the text to fit. If you can't add or delete text, justified text might look worse.

Why not ask the boss if you can give him/her an example?
posted by workinggringa at 1:17 PM on September 26, 2007

There's research that suggests ragged right results in a decrease in comprehension. The book to go to on that topic is Type & Layout by Colin Wheildon.

Here's a pdf you should peruse for an overview.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 1:28 PM on September 26, 2007

Seconding grouse. I'm a book editor and I can attest that in some situations, ragged right really does look better (and it's often easier to read, depending on column size and typeface). Right-justified looks fine if the designer handles it well (i.e., the columns aren't too narrow, the kerning is good, it works with the type, etc.), but I've frankly seen a lot of shitty right-justified text.

So (imo) this isn't solely a design decision; it's legitimately an editorial one as well. Be prepared to listen and compromise (perhaps suggest specific categories of text that will look much cleaner justified, for example, or have a selection of samples of places where it looks better or worse), not merely to go in guns blazing for the sake of defending the honor of right-justified.
posted by scody at 1:38 PM on September 26, 2007

I think you could make your best case with real world examples. Go shopping at the nearest magazine rack and show up at the office with several examples of full justified text from other well designed, well respected magazines. you could even bring a rag-right example as well.
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 1:39 PM on September 26, 2007

Solid academic research showing ragged-right text is bad or justified text is better would make for pretty convincing evidence when you argue your case. Sadly, such evidence is pretty much nonexistent.

At best, there is research that shows that justified text can maybe sorta be more readable for some people, but not all the time, and sometimes ragged-right text is maybe sorta better. Here's a PDF of a Society for Technical Communication conference proceeding that sums up some of the evidence for and against each style. You could probably bolster your case by following the relevant citations from that article to gather more evidence.
posted by that_one_guy at 1:45 PM on September 26, 2007

When I was in my 20s, I would've fought to the death over justification... because I decided that I knew in my heart that something would look like crap and I didn't want anything I worked on to look like crap if I could fight to make it superior. And how hard I fought would've been directly relative to how recently I'd read "The Fountainhead."

Nowadays in that situation, my theory is that ya gotta make sure your battles are big enough to matter & small enough to win. So I will just look at the block of text in question, remind myself that that I should choose my battles wisely and figure out if this is one I want to commit to. And more often than not, in my old age I will then shrug my shoulders and say, "Okay. I don't really like this global style change & here is why (insert reasons). Really, I just don't think it works. But when you're happy I'm happy. You are the boss." And then I cash my paycheck. (More often or not, later they will say "Y'know what? You were right about that justification..." and I'll get my way in time anyhow.)

Ahhh, but after a few weeks another battle will arise. And at that point I will say, "Okay, I was nice & didn't stand in your way with the rag right. Right? Well, I simply cannot make this type puke green Peignot. Sorry. Puke green Peignot is against my religion. Period."

Give & take is a good bargaining tool. Just for me, I'm not sure justification is the biggest battle I'd choose to fight nowadays.

That said, if I was going to fight it, I would probably work up visual samples of layouts done both ways and try to show just how GREAT it could look my way and just how sucky it would look the other way. Visual proof is always helpful to prove a point.
posted by miss lynnster at 1:54 PM on September 26, 2007 [12 favorites]

make sure your battles are big enough to matter & small enough to win

I think I'm going to have that etched directly on to my wall at work.
posted by scody at 2:05 PM on September 26, 2007

After dealing with picky clients and silly requests over 12 years, I've learned to let it go. For god sakes don't get emotional attached to your layouts, otherwise you'll spend the rest of your career grimacing every time anyone but your art director asks for a change.

We're designers, it's our credo to find solutions to problems. Consider this a good time to crack open your InDesign (or god help you Xpress) manual and learn to customize your H & J to make sure you don't spend a lot of time manually fixing bad breaks and widows.

Remember the design isn't about you, it's about the client. If you aren't addressing the client's needs it's just student work.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 3:43 PM on September 26, 2007

This isn't a direct answer, but you need to recognise that you may be bikeshedding
posted by seanyboy at 4:15 PM on September 26, 2007

I think first you should realize that rag-right doesn't suck and that rag-right doesn't make everything look like crap. At the company I work for, we set all our type rag-right and it works great. If you can come up with some specific, relevant design reasons why justified will look better, go with it. Otherwise, learn how to set rag-right so it doesn't look like crap!
posted by wemayfreeze at 5:06 PM on September 26, 2007

Euch, rag-right sucks and makes body copy look like crap. But it is cheaper, because it can be automatically flowed (with hyphenation off) easily, without the care justification really deserves.

What I'd suggest is doing two layouts to show The Boss. But don't do them with text, do them with what Quark calls "Greek" -- really just replacing all the text with 50% grey tone boxes the size of the letters.

The difference between justified text -- clean, box-shaped, symmetrical -- and rag-right is going to be glaring on the proofs. If you can't sell him on the horrors of those meandering rivers of white, you might as well give up.
posted by bonaldi at 6:57 PM on September 26, 2007

If you can't sell him on the horrors of those meandering rivers of white, you might as well give up.

A ragged right that results in "meandering rivers of white" is the result of a bad rag. It is entirely possible to have a clean, elegant, easy-to-read ragged right -- I'm flipping through a couple of beautifully designed books and magazines right now that prove it.

There are good and bad justified right margins, just as there are good and bad ragged right margins. The difference between good and bad does not automatically hinge on the type of margin, but rather the quality of the design.
posted by scody at 7:15 PM on September 26, 2007

A ragged right that results in "meandering rivers of white" is the result of a bad rag.
Well, he's hardly going to work for hours crafting the best-looking rag right to show the boss, is he?
posted by bonaldi at 7:45 PM on September 26, 2007

...do them with what Quark calls "Greek" -- really just replacing all the text with 50% grey tone boxes the size of the letters.

I read The Fountainhead a looooong time ago so I'm just gonna to pretend that sentence wasn't a bit painful for me to read. Even though it kinda was. Sigh. Damned Howard Roarke.

Okay, so he/she may be using another program since the industry is leaning towards CreativeSuite and InDesign right now. Grey boxes were used a lot in old marker comps and I still use them when I'm doing roughed pencil sketches, but lorum ipsum (true greek copy) is generally preferred for digital comping. Maybe your magazine is different. But possibly not. Anyhow, there is even a handy greek copy generator on that site that you can use.

Good luck!
posted by miss lynnster at 7:49 PM on September 26, 2007

Wow, I'm captain recent activity here. I'm suggesting using Quark-style greeking because you don't want it looking anything like real text -- you want to try and get the colour of it over to the boss, so he gets an idea of what the ragging decision means to the text/design as a whole.
posted by bonaldi at 7:59 PM on September 26, 2007

I'm sorry. Please stop calling old-school marker comp text boxes "Quark-style" greeking. Head hurty. And the deep breaths don't seem to help.
posted by miss lynnster at 8:51 PM on September 26, 2007

I'm not. I know what I mean. If you can do them with pencil, they're not what I'm talking about, unless you're spending hours with a ruler and cross-hatching. Which you're not. So take a fucking asprin already.
posted by bonaldi at 3:15 AM on September 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

How would using boxes be advantageous in presenting overall design, when lipsum obviously represents text better, and can represent your font choice?
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:22 AM on September 27, 2007

Because in this particular instance, I'm recommending the OP highlights the essential difference between ragged text and justified text to someone who (presumably, but it doesn't matter) isn't a full-on designer.

If the text is lettering/glyphs/squiggles, it's hard for the untrained eye to see the colour and "shape" it makes, or sometimes even to spot horrid in-text rivers. If you make it grey boxes, the colour and shape leap out.

I use this all the time on execs, and it works much better than when it's text:
"There are too many pictures on this page. They cost £75 each!"
[Greek text on]
"But look, this block looks too grey without the picture here"
"Oh, yes, I see what you mean. Why don't you put a picture there, then".
"Yes, I will. Good idea"
posted by bonaldi at 10:44 AM on September 27, 2007

Thanks, bonaldi. I'm sort of flying blind since my manager quit, doing print design without proper training.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 10:50 AM on September 27, 2007